Forum discussions or profile links for effective link building

[Cruxo]

What's everyone experience in using Forum (be in in discussion threads or in the user profile) as a link building method? Compared to say, blogs (guest posts, blog comments).

[Planet13]

All I can say is in the very narrow niche I look at closely, it seems that article posting, blog comments, forum profiles, etc still seem to work equally quite well.

It isn't a hugely competitive niche though.

We have seen ebay, amazon, and ehow move into the top 10 in SERPs. Those sites have tons of inbound links, obviously, but the content is not so much "on topic." And of course, those three aren't running around posting blog comments or user profiles.

I think the thing to do is look at your competitors' links and try and get "better" links than them, whatever their links are.

[Cruxo]

@Planet13: Could you give me an indication of how big your narrow niche is? Say for the most searched for keywords, how many searches are there roughly per month?

What I have seen from my end is for less competitive niche, forum links can push previously unranked keywords to 2nd page at best. But not strong enough to make it to the 1st page.

I wonder if this is what everyone observes as well. Any thoughts welcome.

[Planet13]

@Planet13: Could you give me an indication of how big your narrow niche is? Say for the most searched for keywords, how many searches are there roughly per month?

Well, using the google keyword search tool and phrase match, it says there are 14,800 for the plural form (widgets), and 12,100 searches for the singular form (widget).

When I use exact match, it drops to only 4,400 for the plural, and a measly 2,400 for the singular version. Ai-Yah! I didn't know it was that low. I really should NOT be spending my time in this area (but I have made my way up to #9 in the SERPs, and I will be darned to give up now - stupid as that sounds).

But it is actually a very general kind of keyword - it isn't a brand, or a particular model of an item. So probably only have the people who search for this keyword are actually looking to purchase (although the SERPs are dominated with ecommerce sites).

There has been some speculation publicly in this forum that getting a small number of authority links can "multiply" the effectiveness of poorer quality links.

[Planet13]

What I have seen from my end is for less competitive niche, forum links can push previously unranked keywords to 2nd page at best. But not strong enough to make it to the 1st page.

The independent sites that rank in the top four or five spaces (they are ahead of the amazon, ebay, and ehow results) seem to have primarily a mixture of these types of links:

Articles on squidoo and other article sites
forum profiles
free / low cost directories (like $10 a year)
blog comments (mostly nofollow, surprisingly)
interlinking between sites
reciprocal linking
paid links (obvious ones)

They might have one or two good links that were naturally given (since the anchor text is generic), but that was about it.